Cherry Beach Express and Yonge Street Riot are among the less celebrated events in Toronto's past that Tim Groves commemorates in a series of posters.

Tim Groves pastes a poster documenting the Cherry Street Express on a utility pole on Cherry St. Groves has been spreading the word about episodes in the city's history that some of us would rather forget.

With a stack of homemade posters, a sponge and a tub of wheat paste, Tim Groves is revising the story of Toronto.

His aim: To ensure that the less celebrated, even shameful, incidents in our collective pasts are remembered. Affixed to telephone poles and other surfaces at the sites where these events occurred, his posters commemorate the notorious Cherry Beach Express, the 1992 Yonge Street Riot and other chapters in the city’s past that mainstream accounts are liable to gloss over.

“Those bits of history are being forgotten, and other bits are being played up,” said Groves, 31. “It’s easy that these (events) could slip from history if there aren’t people that are finding ways to commemorate them.”

The imperative to remember has been a powerful motivator for Groves. A freelance investigative researcher and journalist, he started the initiative, dubbed The Missing Plaque Project, more than 10 years ago.

After spending his teenage years exploring Toronto by bike, Groves was making a ’zine about a city he thought he knew so well. But while researching the 1933 Christie Pits Riot, he was shocked by the scale of the violence that boiled over at the height of anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner tensions.

“I was like, ‘How did I grow up right by there, and not hear about this?’” he recalls.

He abandoned the ’zine idea, and spent the next few months researching the event and consolidating his newfound knowledge into a poster to hang around Christie Pits Park. In the age of the Internet, he borrowed from a tried-and-true approach to connecting with a very specific audience.

“I really wanted to put it up on the street. Just the idea to use a poster to communicate locally, I was really excited about that,” he said.

But unlike traditional historical plaques, which Groves found to be “banal” and lacking in context, he wanted to impart a more complete version of events.

Looking back at his freshman effort — which features a dense block of text — he acknowledged he was perhaps a little overzealous in his desire to inform.

“No one was going to stand there and read that,” he said.

But as the project evolved, he began to appreciate the value of brevity and made an effort to select more reader-friendly designs.

His most recent poster commemorates the Cherry Beach Express, a euphemism for the alleged police brutality that reportedly occurred at a deserted strip of Cherry Beach.

Designed to resemble the front of a Toronto streetcar, the poster recalls in a few short sentences the beatings that were allegedly inflicted on gays and aboriginals and other “undesirables” until the 1990s.

As he glued posters to telephone poles along Cherry St. on Monday, Groves said he wanted to make sure the memory remains in the minds of residents and visitors.

“This was a very abandoned area, and now it’s becoming a prime destination and there’s a lot of development plans,” he said. “It’s all too easy to create this history where it makes it seem like everything is very sanitized.”

Groves includes his email address on his posters, and will make changes if he receives new or more complete information. On a poster explaining the importance of the Don River to First Nations, which was first called the Wonscotanach, he implored anyone with an alternate translation to get in touch.

Although there are pitfalls to his open-source approach — Groves has at times been torn between competing versions of events — he said our idea of history, and the kind of events that warrant memorializing, is changing.

In 2008, for instance, Heritage Toronto unveiled a traditional plaque at Christie Pits to mark the 75th anniversary of the riots.

“You’ll see more and more that there are going to be people who are going to want to look at the history, and see themselves reflected in that history,” Groves said.

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